Strategies for Climate Justice in the Academic Publishing Industry: From Pledges to Direct Action

This article outlines strategies for climate justice as employed by various actors involved in academic knowledge production, from the climate pledges made by publishing conglomerates to the direct actions of science advocacy groups. Taking inspiration from the climate activism tactics used within literary publishing by the campaign group Fossil Free Books, which explicitly positions authors as workers in the publishing industry, this article makes a plea for scholars to similarly position themselves more clearly as workers in the academic publishing industry. The article contends that acknowledging how scholars and their labor are materially embedded in and shaped by systems of knowledge production, and hence recognizing the leverage they have to argue for and demand a more ecologically sustainable publishing system, can benefit their climate justice organizing. I further support this argument by making connections to recent research on ecological governance and knowledge production, especially to theories and theorists arguing for the importance of seeing climate justice principles and practices as integrally connected to issues of labor and social justice in publishing. Based on this, I put forward and discuss various (speculative) strategies focused on reframing ecological governance in knowledge production (ranging from degrowth and the redistribution of wealth under conditions of structural inequity to slow science and situated openness) and explore the potential of disruptive actions and alternative publishing models to re-politicize technocratic approaches to environmental governance in the publishing industry.